All posts tagged Atlanta Hawks

Brooklyn Nets center Brook Lopez tries to break up a pass from Atlanta Hawks center Al Horford and forward Paul Millsap during Game 1 of their first-round series.

European Pressphoto Agency

The time-honored wisdom says that an athlete won’t be respected properly until he’s won something—as Kobe Bryant pointed out, it’s more of a convenient narrative than the honest truth. The Atlanta Hawks, however, are an entire franchise that’s about to be judged on the same terms.

The Hawks eked out a close Game 1 win over the Brooklyn Nets, who play awkward, hesitant basketball like a teenager taking out dad’s card for her first drive. No matter: The Nets took advantage of their size, out-rebounding Atlanta and scraping together enough ugly, second-chance points to make one think they won’t get swept. Two of Atlanta’s four All-Stars sustained or aggravated existing injuries; their unselfish style of play, in which the ball whips around the court to the open man, was forced to a halt as they struggled to generate points. “Instead, Atlanta turned in the kind of utilitarian effort we more commonly see 333 miles to the east-northeast in Memphis’ Grindhouse,” writes ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz. Read More »

Chris Webber, a former No. 1 draft pick who had a 15-year NBA career, emerged Thursday as the face of a group bidding on the Hawks.

The franchise has been on the market since September, when Bruce Levenson said he would divest his majority ownership stake after reporting to the league an email he wrote that discriminated against the Hawks’ predominantly black fan base. Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed has said that more than 50% of the team is for sale between Levenson and his partners’ shares. Read More »

Assuming the moral arc of the NBA bends toward justice, there’s a potential playoffs scenario scripted right out of a Disney film: The Los Angeles Clippers win the title, and accept the trophy during a ceremony that doesn’t include owner Donald Sterling, who was banned from the NBA for life earlier this week. The players enjoy their championship, the fans enjoy rooting for an uncorrupted experience, and Sterling reflects on his misdemeanors from somewhere inside a Beverly Hills mansion.

Except it couldn’t be that simple. Not just because Sterling may contest the penalty levied on him by commissioner Adam Silver, which may force him to sell the Clippers against his will, but because the Clippers might struggle to get that far. This is a loaded playoffs, where conventional wisdom has flown out the window: Teams are winning on the road, and lower seeds going punch-for-punch with opponents that vastly outperformed them in the regular season. On Thursday night, the Clippers lost narrowly to the Golden State Warriors, pushing them to a Game 7. Golden State is fighting for more than their season: coach Mark Jackson, who has guided them toward more success than any other Warriors coach in recent memory, is reportedly on the outs with management and a risk to leave after the year should the Warriors not make a deep run in the playoffs. The Clippers, meanwhile, are fighting for their self-identity, to show that they’re not defined by their relationship to a man no one seems to like right now. “Of course there will be a Game 7. How could there not?” writes Sports Illustrated’s Phil Taylor. “This weird, disjointed, political, contentious, compelling series seems destined to wring every drop of energy, emotional and otherwise, from the Clippers and Warriors. Going the distance was inevitable.”

In the same night, the Indiana Pacers managed to salvage their season by pulling away from the Atlanta Hawks in the final quarter, forcing a Game 7. Roy Hibbert continued playing like an uprooted tree, forcing coach Frank Vogel to eventually shift to a smaller lineup that fans have clamored for all series as Hibbert has struggled. It hasn’t all been Hibbert, of course: The Pacers have looked historically disappointing this series like no other number one seed has, and before the game Vogel gave them a pep talk about how early adversity usually leads to later success. “We’ll just see about that,” writes the Indianapolis Star’s Bob Kravitz. “For now, though, it’s about surviving and ultimately advancing against the Atlanta Hawks, who give them fits and force them to change personnel and personality.”

The Oklahoma City Thunder coasted to a blowout of the Memphis Grizzlies, the same day that Kevin Durant was called “unreliable” by his local paper, and also gave themselves one more game to make good on all those preseason championship expectations. The “unreliable” headline made for a hilarious bit of sports micro controversy, as Durant is so good a player and so milquetoast a personality that it’s hard to find an criticism that would actually stick. (The newspaper eventually apologized for the headline, too, making this a particularly low day for journalistic discourse.) “The need to immediately prove yourself at unreasonable levels comes with the territory for an NBA superstar,” writes Sports on Earth’s Sean Highkin. “Durant is the only one who has remained completely beloved, which makes even one critical newspaper headline completely jarring.” But when the stories are so big elsewhere in the league, a little creativity is required. Read More »

Lance Stephenson and George Hill react late in the fourth quarter of a loss to Atlanta.

ZUMAPRESS.com

There hasn’t been a more disappointing number one seed in recent NBA history than the Indiana Pacers, who won 56 games in the regular season but now look like they’re being controlled by a toddler with a Playstation 3 controller. There’s no way to chalk it up to injury, like the 2011 San Antonio Spurs, or playoff jitters, like the 2008 Boston Celtics: This is the underachieving Pacers team we’ve seen the for last few months, and the playoffs haven’t changed anything.

Take the way they melted down at the end of Game 3 against the Atlanta Hawks, falling to a 1-2 deficit against a team that didn’t even sniff .500 in the regular season. Paul George and Roy Hibbert, Indiana’s two All-Stars, combined to score fewer points than three Hawks on their own. As a team, they made a quarter of their three-point attempts. Hibbert had fewer rebounds than every single player on his team. “The Hibbert who once powered into the lane for short hooks tossed up fallaway jump shots. The 7-foot-2 Hibbert who would have scoffed at 6-8 Paul Millsap’s attempts to defend him was routinely pushed off his spot,” writes Sports Illustrated’s Chris Mannix. “Point blank looks led to missed layups, passes in the paint were fumbled away. Hibbert played the first 6 ½ minutes of the third quarter on Wednesday before being banished to the bench the rest of the night.” Read More »

Hopes were high in Atlanta in the summer of 1982 for teams that would reach the second round of the playoffs for years to come.

On the latest Sports Retort, how should fans feel about teams like the Atlanta Hawks that are often good, never great? Also: Which sports events are worth waking up early for? Have you heard of anyone chasing Tiger at Torrey Pines? What’s the most expensive piece of sports equipment you’ve ever broken? Plus: Requisite Michigan boasting, holes in the plots of classic fairy tales and much more.

For Baltimore, a win in the Super Bowl by the hometown Ravens would be nice, the city’s first championship after a modest wait of a dozen years. The Ravens got to the Super Bowl by upsetting the New England Patriots, which means Pats fans will have to wait for at least one more year since their last title — in 2005. They can console themselves with the three major-pro-sport titles Boston has won since then, including one each in the NHL, NBA and MLB. Baltimore will face San Francisco in the Super Bowl, as the 49ers go for their first NFL title since 1995. In the meantime, the Giants have won the World Series twice in the last three years to keep Bay Area fans at bay.

And then there’s Atlanta, still waiting for its second major pro-sport title since the Braves won the World Series in 1995. Since then, Atlanta’s teams have made the playoffs 30 times in the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL but have come away without any championships, a streak that the 49ers extended by coming back from a 17-0 first-half deficit to beat the Falcons, 28-24, in Atlanta in the NFC championship game on Sunday. That’s only the second-longest title-less streak in the city’s history: Atlanta went 0 for 34 in playoff appearances before the Braves won the ’95 World Series. Read More »

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Jeremy Gordon is a freelance writer who lives in Chicago. He has written for TheAtlantic.com, MTV and Prefix and occasionally Tumbles and Tweets. The last time he cried was when Steve Bartman dropped the ball.

Jared Diamond writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. He currently serves as a beat reporter covering the New York Mets and Major League Baseball.